The 20 or so drawings by Guy Allott in the book you areholding fall into two over-lapping clusters, firstly the ‘sadtrees’ with their dappled hints of Samuel Palmer and thelater English neoromantics, and secondly a larger group ofoff-world landscapes, populated by occasional jolly dancingtree-people, with towering mountains at 360 degrees, obedientto no mere earthly laws of physics or geological time.Throughout the history of European art one recognisesthe pleasure particular artists have derived from depictingwood-grain, from Giotto and Piero della Francesca, toBraque, Magritte, and Guston. Here paint remains deliciouslyand timelessly itself in the very act of signifying woodness,and the age of trees that grow to an entirely differenttime-scale to our own, and on which our entire civilizationhas depended, from hearth and home to boats and funeralpyres, to say nothing of charcoal, paper or stretchers. Thetrees in which we hid as children, which we climbed and fellout of, were here long before our earliest ancestors. Acknowledgedand revered in almost every known society,their branches stretch out from the ancient Norse legend ofYggdrasil, the tree of the world, to the sadly speaking tree ofAnglo-Saxon poetry, and so on to Avatar.The conventions of landscape were of course largely redundantfor most of the last century, but generous and inclusivethey now feel alert and meaningful again, and instinct withour sense of the present, as Allott’s work so powerfullydemonstrates. Here real trees invade imaginary planets, toparaphrase Marianne Moore. They remind us, if we need tobe reminded, that the landscapes of the old masters are alwaysreal places, from the craggy cloud-capped azure peakswhich surround the little town of Pieve di Cadore high up inthe Dolomites where Titian grew up as a child, to Constable’sSuffolk, or Joseph Anton Koch’s majestic Wetterhorn,or Allott’s native Yorkshire.Always the moon presides indifferently over our sleep anddreams, but who could have guessed that when we finallygot there it would prove to be so anti climatic, so very unlikethe sci-fi film and comic landscapes of which twentieth-centuryadults and children alike dreamed? It was not howeverthe real surface of the moon that so affected our perceptions,for after all we know that for most of its history our ownworld was just as vastly lifeless. It was on the contrary theshockingly vulnerable beauty of planet earth as visible fromspace in that first astonishing ‘blue marble’ photographthat so jolted the imagination. We are hardly the first toenvisage Gaia, the animate mothering earth, but has anyprevious image ever shown her more isolated and defenceless?One could argue that modern mapping techniques arechanging the way we envisage landscape.Meanwhile the galaxies and constellations continue toswing above our heads sublimely indifferent to our mortalideas of progress. Besides, the pastoral vision has never beenrestricted to depictions of our planet, and many of its mostpoetic expressions have always lead us up into the skies, andit has moreover always been the nature of Romanticism tothink big as well as tiny. One wouldn’t really be that suprisedto find Keats sitting on one of Allott’s lonely planets listeningout intently for the plaintive beep of an orbiting satellite.The beautiful imaginary paradoxical worlds to which hetakes us obey their own physical and pictorial rules, defiantlyflouting the familiar conventions of binocularearth-bound human vision. Who is to say if his melancholywrecked art historical space ships are what they seem at all?They might after all be monuments, or alien art-works?With their constant confusions of upand-down, and infront-or-behind, Allott’s radiant other worlds remind us ofhappier past visions of outer space, imagined as a universeof far-off utopian destinations safely ready and waiting forus in the face of possible global catastrophe. But in themeantime as he has suggested: ‘It seems we will be earthboundfor some time’ 1.1Guy Allott, ‘2010